Instant messaging - good or bad for your people?

It is amazing to see people who work quite closely together using some form of instant messenger (IM) to talk to one another. Software developers seem to like this best – as if the fear of human contact might be too much for them. It’s got benefits. I think the record I’ve seen is seven parallel conversations but I also wonder how well people do if they have another form of interruption that they can’t resist.

The phone is bad enough, but now you have email, text messages and instant messages there to just break that concentration. Some day (if I’m really bored) I intend to try to calculate how much time is lost in each working day to IM conversations that are to outside the company.

I knew with one animator that if I just walked up to his workstation there would be an MSN window showing. Invariably it would start to flash at some point as I spoke to him as the other person wondered why he had gone quiet.

I won’t mention the guy who used to enjoy ‘playing’ in specialist Yahoo chat rooms whilst at work. I never realised I could reduce someone to a nervous ball of sweat until I confronted him – not cool.

So what’s the right policy? Well I think using IM inside a company is great – Skype is becoming particularly popular as it provides a reasonable IM capability alongside the voice calling capability. I personally believe that external IM is a pain and a drain in equal measure. However, not all IM client software can be configured around a limited set of users so this may be a dyke my finger won’t fit.

© Copyright 2005 Richard A D Jones

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